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As a reward to myself for processing another event, I let myself play. This time with the Percolator app on my iPhone and of course PhotoShop.
The shot itself is a reward of a sort as well, a gift from my boss of a mosaic birdhouse she made me for my birthday- as a reward for encouraging & inspiring her to get into art. I was ecstatic.
pacificbattleship.com/visit-us/special-exhibits/lost-at-sea/
Battleship IOWA Museum launches “Lost at Sea: The Explorations of Dr. Robert Ballard,” Ballard is known the world over for his discovery of the final resting place of RMSTitanic; yet, many vessels that have been claimed by our oceans and seas lie undisturbed in “undersea museums” and will be revealed aboard the historic USS IOWA. The retrospective is a showcase for the museum highlighting many of the world’s historically noted underwater wrecks found by the explorer.
The Battleship USS Iowa, permanently docked in San Pedro, CA, as a Long Angeles tourist attraction, is more than a historic ship available for tours.
It is also a museum. In fact, it’s official name is the Battleship IOWA Museum and it has a display from one of the world’s great maritime explorers – certainly one of the most famous – Dr. Robert Ballard.
Known for being the man who discovered Titanic, Ballard also has many other finds, several of which are part of the Iowa’s “Lost at Sea: The Explorations of Dr. Robert Ballard.”
It features the luxury liner RMS Lusitania, sunk by the Germans during World War I, explored off the coast of Ireland in 1993; Titanic’s sister ship, HMHS Britannic, brought to the ocean’s floor by a World War I German mine; and PT-109, President John F. Kennedy’s boat, that at the age of 26, the future commander-in-chief risked his life to save his crew, becoming a war-hero and setting a future political stage.
Five additional wrecks including USS Thresher, USS Scorpion, Germany’s U-166 (part of Operation Drumbeat where Hitler’s U-boats prowled America’s coast), the mighty German battleship KM Bismarck, USS Yorktown and ships from The Battle of Guadalcanal will be explored as visitors tour through the newly created exhibition space throughout Battleship IOWA Museum.
“This exhibition features some of my most significant shipwreck expeditions,” Ballard said. “We are presenting not only the expeditions but the historical context of each incident. The excitement that each expedition presented, we should not lose sight of the significant toll of human life lost at sea that each shipwreck represents.”
“Battleship IOWA Museum is incredibly excited to produce the most comprehensive and educational experience on Dr. Ballard’s underwater findings,” states Jonathan Williams, CEO and President of Pacific Battleship Center, the museum’s non-profit entity. “We feel thankful that we can bring this experience to the masses. It showcases the ocean’s depths and rewards of STEM programs while engaging today’s youth and inspiring future generations.”
“Supervising the installation of the Lost at Sea exhibit with our crew has been a tremendously rewarding experience,” says Mike Getscher, Battleship IOWA Museum’s Executive Vice-President and COO. “We are immensely grateful to our crew for all of their hard work during the creation of this project and to Dr. Ballard for his cooperation. The effort involved thousands of hours of crew time to give you all an idea of the scope of the work involved.”
The ifs course at Enfield Grammar School helps students develop the crucial financial life skills they need, whether progressing from secondary school into further and higher education, or entering the world of work.
August 26, 2015; Portland, OR, USA; Rose City Rewards Party at Providence Park. Photo: Molly J Smith-Portland Timbers
After some fun and laughs, some peeptinis and pizza - here are the results of our efforts. Andrea felt that she needed to put her finger in the photo too. All of our fingers had been well dyed as well as the eggs.
Positive reinforcement is the way we train all of the animals at Reid Park Zoo. By keeping it fun and reward-based, we are encouraging them to be excited about training with us and putting their best paws forward.
Here Trainer Jed is rewarding a Fennec Fox with some tasty vegetables and coconut bits.
The R&R celebrations for June were held with the usual gusto and enthusiasm in Vee Technologies. The CEO made an impassioned speech about meeting technological updates head-on by being prepared for it and welcomed suggestions and ideas to take the company forward.
Jenny Holzer, Born Gallipolis, OH 1950
For SAAM, 2007, electronic LED array with white diodes, 336 x 48 in.
Jenny Holzer created For SAAM especially for this gallery of high ceilings and open space.
Since the 1970s, the artist has created public art, sculptures, and projections that present bold phrases out of context. These snippets of advice, cautions, and desires are stated as if self-evident, despite being subjective and debatable. Holzer's work encourages us to ask, "Who is speaking and in whose interest?" when ideas are pushed on the public but we do not know from where or why.
The texts presented here are written in different voices and come from four series that span decades of Holzer's career. The words appear to swirl and rotate at varying speeds as little lights across the column turn on and off. This constant movement rewards viewers who slow down to piece together what For SAAM has to say.
Jenny Holzer presents original and found statements in a wide range of formats, inviting us to consider the societal messages we receive and the power dynamics underwriting them. "I like placing content wherever people look," she has remarked, "and that can be at the bottom of a cup or on a shirt or hat or on the surface of a river or all over a building."
In 1972, as an aspiring painter, Holzer was awarded a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University. She received an MFA in 1977 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she began writing on her previously abstract drawings and paintings because she "wanted content in the work." Around this time, Holzer moved to New York City, joining the art collective Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab) and enrolling in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In New York City, Holzer began her first text-based series, Truisms (1977–79), consisting of typed lists of aphorisms––like "Money creates taste"––that are offered as general truths. Gathering these sayings together illuminates how divergent and contradictory supposedly shared observations can be. Initially, Holzer posted the Truisms anonymously around the city, leaving viewers to decide what held "true" for them.
In the early 1980s, Holzer continued her interventions into public space with her Living series (1980–82), placing matter-of-fact descriptions of "everyday life with a twist" on signs and metal plaques mounted on buildings, in the style of historical markers or directories. A pivotal 1982 invitation to display work on the Spectacolor signboard in Times Square led to Holzer's first use of electronic signage. This became a signature medium she continues to explore, often through site-specific, commissioned LED installations.
Extended time in rocky upstate New York from the mid-1980s spurred Holzer's interest in stone, and, in 1986, she began making benches carved with her words. Amid the AIDS epidemic, Holzer also made sarcophagi featuring the mournful language of her series Laments (1989), and in 1996 further reflected on loss in Arno, a text she used for her first light projection that same year. In the early 1990s, Holzer variously responded to atrocities of war, in text-based series as well as memorials, and her 2005 return to painting saw her enlarging redacted government documents related to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq to fill large canvases. Public works from the late 2010s tackle gun violence and encourage voting, often through truck-mounted texts.
Throughout her career, Holzer's engagement with language has consistently moved across forms and contexts, from clothing to trucks to light projections on architecture and natural terrain. In her site-specific For SAAM (2007), texts from Truisms, Living, Survival (1983–85), and Arno swirl down a towering LED column, together offering a mini-survey of her early career.
Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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